Body Bags

• It was built as a backdoor pilot. Showtime wanted an anthology series to chase HBO's Tales from the Crypt, but pulled the plug after only three tales were shot, so the completed segments were stitched into a feature and aired August 8, 1993.
• Carpenter directed the first two tales (The Gas Station and Hair); Tobe Hooper directed the third (Eye) and turns up on camera with Tom Arnold as the two morgue attendants in the closing bookend.
• The Gas Station is stacked with horror royalty in bit parts: Wes Craven appears as the Pasty-Faced Man and Sam Raimi plays the dead real attendant, Bill, whose identity the killer steals.
• Roger Corman, the man who once gave half these filmmakers their first jobs, shows up in the Eye segment as Dr. Bregman.
• Carpenter himself plays the wisecracking Coroner who hosts the whole thing, deep in ghoul makeup and cracking puns over the cadavers.
• Carpenter co-wrote the score with Jim Lang, and the soundtrack opens on a cut literally titled The Coroner's Theme.

The Coroner isn't narrating deaths so much as collecting them. He treats every corpse like a prize and ends the film climbing into a body bag himself, which reads less like a host signing off and more like Death taking a shift on the slab he's been working all along.

Hair plays as a straight punishment fable for vanity. Stacy Keach's character won't accept aging, so the cure he buys literally consumes the brain he was trying to flatter, and the alien parasites are just the genre's blunt way of saying a man this hollow was always going to be eaten from the head down.

Eye argues that a transplant carries more than tissue. The ballplayer doesn't gradually go mad from trauma, he inherits a dead killer's cravings wholesale, which lets the segment treat identity as something physical and contagious rather than something the mind owns or controls.

From inside a county morgue, a ghoulish Coroner unzips three body bags and tells you how each tenant got there. A graveyard-shift gas station attendant gets stalked by a killer who's escaped from a mental hospital. A balding vanity case buys a miracle hair treatment that turns out to be feeding, not growing. A minor-league ballplayer trades a wrecked eye for a transplant and inherits the murderous appetites of the dead man it came from. Three deaths, one host who clearly enjoys the work, and a punchline waiting on the slab at the end.